BUILT TO BE WRONG


Looking at all these dot-com blowouts, and watching the stock market slide each day - all these silly, puffed-up ideas and complete idiot business models -you might start to wonder, is every single person on Earth a total moron, are they ever going to get it right? But then you remember that the human brain was never designed to figure these things out - to get them right in the first place - but merely to be a vessel for religion and imititation.


For example, suppose in the earliest stages of human upbringing, you tell a child to wash his hands before dinner. Are you going to explain to him the growth and survival patterns of tiny microscopic organisms called bacteria - which somehow the whole human race survived without knowing for thousands of years - and how our daily demographic migration patterns cause bacteria to become distributed on various surfaces you're statistically likley to pick up a bad trace of now and then, and how when transferred to food and left to culture under certain chance temperature and other conditions, this bacteria can then be transferred back to your body where certain tissues are susceptible to it? Is the idiot kid going to figure this out for himself?? No!! The reason the child washes his hands before coming to dinner is because if he doesn't, his mother is going to smack him!


So you get all these idiot ideas. Why does the Federal Reserve lower interest rates? Does it have something to do with evolved inventory decisions to denominate excess personal claims on spoiling assets in cash creating a self-perpetuating price signal masking true investment demand?? Huh??? No, of course everyone knows the reason the Fed eases rates is "to stimulate the economy." What is the number one criterion dictating the potential success or failure of a new B2B e-commerce exchange on the Internet? Oh wait, I know this one... it's... "Critical Mass!" Why shalt thou not steal? Does it have something to do with inducing catallactic cooperation incentives and creating a spontaneous price-implicit need-transmission network between total strangers dissipating geographic entropy in an extended order of non-tribal human interaction? Perhaps... But, barring that, the main reason we don't steal is because we'll go to jail first and hell second.


So, of course, given that it would be totally unfeasible to run a society - whether made up of men or dogs - on actual reasons, the human brain is designed to seize on all these what you might call substitute reasons, these simplifications which - whether you label them "religion" or "nonsense" - do the job. All people need to know is that if you act a certain way you'll get a certain result or, even better, if you do this the outcome will be good, if you do that the outcome will be bad, never mind why, or even what the specific outcome will be!


But of course some of the ideas will be right, and some of the ideas - no matter how popular or reasonable-sounding to the broad masses of society - will be wrong. And the only way to separate out the rigth from the wrong - given that even the most brilliant scientists and economists are too stupid to figure it out for themselves - is by evolution. Over a period of years natural selection will inexorably kill off the people who carry the wrong ideas, and slowly replace them with the people and businesses that, completely by chance, hold the right ones - without any central figure in Washington or elsewhere needing to look out across the landscape and declare he knows what works or why.


You say how can a complex economy function without anybody, not even the smartest among us, having even the slightest clue what is going on? How can the New York Times be filled from cover to cover each day with absolute bilge, the basest of nonsense, and none of the silliness which people latch onto like brain chewing gum having even the slightest basis in reality? (And remember, isolated facts, like the President's age, are merely molecules, the magic only happens when people piece together a random pieces of undeniable plastic and aluminim to hallucinate a car where there may be none.) And yet out of this fantasy land an actual paper does arrive at our door each day - you can touch it - and we don't all starve on hallucinated nonsense that merely fulfills our grossly simplified notion of what food is supposed to look and taste like?


Well of course it cannot be a requirement of complex ecosystems, whether composed of single-celled organisms, forest animals, or human beings, that the participants have any idea what is going on for them to function. Of course since animals can't have ideas, the functioning of the systems they operate in has to be not just idea-resistant, but completely idea-independent - which leaves people free to think whatever they want. Individually we may think and eat garbage, and individually we may perish, but the system is designed to work through all that, to pick us up and then throw us away like spent fuel rods, or like unwitting slaves in some sci-fi-nightmare/brave-new-world idea hatchery. Experiencing no cost for individual lives on the total number, the system wants us to think nonsense, experiment, and die as a sacrifice in the name of progress.


For the price system to function across kingdoms and oceans in medieveal Europe, for example, the last thing that was needed was a bunch of pointy-heads like me who understand the intricacies of non-redundant capacity and consumption signals in the supply chain. Quite the opposite, all that was required was a bunch of loudmouth, simpleminded merchants who traveled a lot, talked to a lot of people wherever they traveled, remembered what all the people in the different places told them, empathized with their needs and haves, and tallied them against one another - and had the political instincts to move between cultures. The trade routes were a primitive fiber-optic network, only better, because of a number of esoteric non-redundant inter-coordination problems, satisfied only by geographic friction, but which nobody will ever understand or - need to understand!


You might say the problem with a price and production system run entirely by people who, by necessity, haven't the faintest clue how it works is that, without knowing what they are doing, your average smart person will be inclined to shoot the middleman when prices go up, attempt to abolish the price system and replace it with a more rational set of incentives - created by good, thinking people coming together and that we can all agree on -or even try to cook up some new sort of marketplace or B2B supply chain completely from scratch on the Internet! But the beauty of the non-reality system we have in place is that people can be that dumb and, thanks to evolution, the problem will take care of itself. No one need ever get a clue!


By this rule, success in business, for instance, does not come from figuring anything out or from building a better mousetrap, as the saying goes. Rather, it comes from how well you are tuned into the nonsense-network. If two different companies are producing two different widgets, it is impossible for anyone to have any idea which one will work better or why. What is possible, and what is relevant, is how quickly you can learn what is the right kind of widget to build, and whether you have enough contacts at whatever turns out to be the good-widget factory, to get a job doing whatever they tell you has been discovered to work, before the fad climaxes and dies out. At no time is it necessary, or even possible, to figure anything out, not unless you want to start a new wave of lab rats, or even risk living and dying as a lab-rat yourself.


So, given that the real living thing is the collective culture, and the system into which this culture arranges people, whatever they may think, how is it that individuals allow themselves to be made into suckers, or fall prey as rats in the lab of untested ideas? At the heart of it is a culture of left-win arrogance - the idea that man can think and can shape his own world - which you find in abundance in university communities like Cambridge and Palo Alto. Ideas are incubated in self-insulating intellectual communities like the academic peer-review circle, among people who, having resigned themselves to a certain lifestyle and secured it, pay no price for being wrong. (Idle-rich housewives gossiping in salons enjoy a similarly rare freedom to venture far and wide from the moorings of reality in their musings, as well as people all over who believe something is true just because the right people think it is, and who safely voted for Bill Clinton because the imperceptible feedback to the cost in their indiviudal lives is born collectively, and is too remote and abstract to shape individual behaviors in a single country or generation).


The first layer of erecting the castle in the air that is the new idea is the existing set of substitute or nonsense ideas - ideas such as wash your hands or thou shalt not steal - that were never meant to be dissected and recombined and used as building blocks in newer, more complex notions, by unbridled "smart" people. Or at least the seemingly logical building blocks (where the logic is merely an illusion or a substitute idea) were never tested for efficacy in these new combinations or applications, but that is what is endeavored to be done. We all know 5 + 5 = 3, the Fed will stimulate the economy, and non-farmers who do no "real" phsyical labor will exploit us, so it's a foregone conclusion what will happen if we add a third five!


Since the original belief system is not what is real but, by necessity, what is plausible in order to get people to behave a certain way, the first test the new idea faces is plausibility. In fact, at this stage the idea is just like a virus whose only necessary trait is plausibility, given the existing set of nonsense assumptions that do work, and it need not have any basis in reality. All the idea needs is an arrogant Ivy-League professor, a straight-A student capable of absorbing it without question - even understanding it's abstract "logic" - and then an established or highly-evolved, successful business for the student to go infect when he gets a good job out of college!


So the idea-virus spreads and becomes more popular depending on how plausible it is and how well it resonates with the existing set of nonsense-beliefs, which may themelves be too new to be tested by anything but plausibility! It is at this point where the lab rats - the people who actually pay a price for being wrong in the real world - get swept up in it, to learn if it is a good or bad virus-idea. And as large groups of people start behaving differently, of course teh texture of society, in which pre-existing behaviors must continue to operate, is thrown into a constant flux and turmoil, so that yet another third behavior may be put on top, but only so long as some fourth behavior, whihc is doomed, persists. So this may self-perpetuate for a time, to some sort of a social climax or revolution, followed by a decay, a collapse, and a return to previous norms.


It is important, getting back to the beginning, to remember that people have no idea what is going on, rather their brains are built primarily for the adoption, transmission, and even defense by fire against competing idea carriers, of bad ideas to which they are slaves.


When you bring home a new electrical appliance, you can probably figure out how to put the batteries in without needing to assimilate a copy of the instructions - which assimilable instruction-teachings someone else figured out by trial and error, and then made a million copies of for a million different people in potentially identical situtaions. It is even quite possible that, if you had never even experienced a battery or an electronic appliance before in your life, you might discard the two into a chimpanzee's cage for lack of any idea how they were connected or what they could be combined to produce. Then that dumb, fidgeting ape might even get the positives and negatives lined up right in a few days, then other chimps could copy him and get the same result. Lord only knows what idiot ideas they might seize on for what the thing is or why it does what it does, only when it started makign noises it would probably play their instincts for a sucker by convinving them there must be a baby chimp inside the box.


But again, the point of the brain is not to figure things out, but merely to transmit them, through the written and spoken word once they have already been figured out, and then to remember them. Because with a million idiots plodding along in their own little fantasy lands, stumbling on things that work is inevitable (and then you do more of what you're doing, have lots of kids, and write lots of magazine articles). A single human brain, in a single lifetime, no matter if it were as big as a house, could never hope to compete with a thousand imitating zombies experimenting at random over a thousand years, in terms of its ability to figure things out and, fortunately, it doesn't need to.


It is a very broad misconception that, even in every day life, people are thinking. At most, they are comparing past experiences, or series of events in time translated into a loose network of summarizing or representative symbols, to the present situation, and choosing which past experience or combination the present experience is most like. Or they are trying to fit a situation to a certain label, so they can know which rule, learned from their own expereince or that of others taught them, to apply, or to communicate the perception of the situation with others and elicit a coordinated pattern of pre-conditioned behaviors. Beyond that, a person is just an evolved stimulus-response catalog of varying sorting precision and complexity. Moreover, since a person cannot shape the events that go into his catalog, he cannot, as is popularly believed, think and reason outside this catalog.


Of course there is some exception to this rule, based on the geometric increase in complexity between the very local environment and the very macro environment in which the individual must operate simultaneously. And calling this difference in complexity geometric is a geometric understatement. In very small systems, a sufficient number of catalog experiences may present a discernible pattern of rules, such that whatever visual or logical events may occur, they may be foreseen by the individual despite having never been experienced by anyone who could have possibly learned a response behavior to teach him! So sure, somebody might be able to get something right right under his nose, and so long as it involves only one or two people, whom he knows very well, interacting, and not a lot of math. There is an equlibrium in the complexity and size of the moral code, and how specific it needs to get, Deuteronomy vs. the New Covenant and so forth - but nowadays we just teach everyoenb how to read and let them figure that otu for themselves. Things that occur many times in a lifetime, and don't cost you your life, can be left to be relearned by each subsequent generation.


Why somebody would want to listen to his college professor in fields other than sales, medicine and engineering, and learn some experimental new-fangled nonsense that will probably doom him to a life of poverty, when he could go right down the street to his neighborhood church or synangogue and learn something that's worked - and made people wealthier - for a thousand years, is beyond me. But I would imagine the level of suckers in a society, or the level of experimentation, operates at some magical, incomprehensible equilibrium too, there is an order to the madness. Certainly, in the larger catallaxy, 99% of what 99% of people think and do for a living is utterly useless. But who can claim to sort it out apart from history itself?


So, in conclusion regarding this whole so-called Internet Bubble, of course a bunch of smart college guys though up a new, non-evolved business topology, or a creature that had never been put to the test. The creature is only viable if sub-evolution within the creature is viable. The problem is that businesses which, as minds, cannot evolve time-series models in the new supply chain topology because there is no friction and the associations are not tree-shaped and friction-asymmetric. Huh? The keys to the maintenance of the micrtostructure of empty space (which I cut out of this already overlong essay), the keys to the stimulus-response in the human brain, the geographic friction within the brain itself, dividing the continuous gray matter into different super and sub-regions with distinct topology


enough...


loudmouth